Sailors aiming to recreate Captain Bligh's voyage set off

Sailors hoping to recreate Captain William Bligh's epic 4,000-mile open boat
voyage have set off on their expedition.

3:44AM BST 29 Apr 2010

The four-man crew were cast adrift off the coast of Tonga in the early hours of Thursday morning - at the exact same location where Bligh and his sailors from HMS Bounty started some 221 years ago.

They were due to leave on the 25ft long Talisker Bounty Boat on Wednesday, the same day as the original mutiny, but were delayed by 24 hours because of high wind warnings.

Skipper Don McIntyre said: ''We're incredibly excited to start the expedition today and feel close to the experience of Captain Bligh and his crew.

''However everyone aboard the Talisker Bounty Boat will be pushed to the limit of endurance and survival, forever hungry and unsure of everything, except their own desire to fight through this.''

A spokesman for the effort said the crew were enjoying ''pleasant'' sailing conditions with 15 knots of breeze.

The voyage across the Pacific to Timor in the open wooden boat is due to take around seven weeks.

Among the crew is a sailing novice from Warwick who stepped in as a last minute replacement.

Gap-year student Chris Wilde, 18, answered an appeal in a newspaper article to join the crew after Mike Perham, who became the youngest person to circumnavigate the world solo with assistance in August last year, withdrew after suffering appendicitis.

Mr Wilde said the challenge was ''a once in a lifetime opportunity''.

''To make an epic voyage no one has undertaken in 221 years, to be a part of something legendary and to push myself to my physical and mental limits, that's a chance you don't often get,'' he said when he was named as part of the team earlier this month.

Mr Wilde is joined by Australian Mr McIntyre, 55, and Dave Pryce, 39, along with David Wilkinson, 48, an Englishman who has lived in Hong Kong for the past 17 years.

The crew hopes to raise about £150,000 for The Sheffield Institute Foundation for Motor Neurone Disease.

They will face the same deprivations as the original sailors, cast adrift from HMS Bounty on April 28 1789, in the middle of the Pacific without navigation charts or everyday items such as a torch and toilet paper. They had just two weeks' water supply and limited food.

Mr Perham, 18, from Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, is still recuperating from surgery.